Mark Pizzato's Books

Mapping Global Theatre Histories

By: Mark Pizzato

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Mapping Global Theatre Histories

By: Mark Pizzato

This textbook provides a global, chronological mapping of significant areas of theatre, sketched from its deepest history in the evolution of our brain's 'inner theatre' to ancient, medieval, modern, and postmodern developments. It considers prehistoric cave art and built temples, African trance dances, ancient Egyptian and Middle-Eastern ritual dramas, Greek and Roman theatres, Asian dance-dramas and puppetry, medieval European performances, global indigenous rituals, early modern to postmodern Euro-American developments, worldwide postcolonial theatres, and the hyper-theatricality of today's mass and social media. Timelines and numbered paragraphs form an overall outline with distilled details of what students can learn, encouraging further explorations online and in the library. Questions suggest how students might reflect on present parallels, making their own maps of global theatre histories, regarding geo-political theatrics in the media, our performances in everyday life, and the theatres inside our brains.

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Page Count

332

Publisher

Springer

Published Date

ISBN 10

3030127273

ISBN 13

9783030127275

Beast-People Onscreen and in Your Brain

The Evolution of Animal-Humans from Prehistoric Cave Art to Modern Movies

By: Mark Pizzato

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Beast-People Onscreen and in Your Brain

The Evolution of Animal-Humans from Prehistoric Cave Art to Modern Movies

By: Mark Pizzato

A new take on our bio-cultural evolution explores how the "inner theatre" of the brain and its "animal-human stages" are reflected in and shaped by the mirror of cinema. Vampire, werewolf, and ape-planet films are perennial favorites—perhaps because they speak to something primal in human nature. This intriguing volume examines such films in light of the latest developments in neuroscience, revealing ways in which animal-human monster movies reflect and affect what we naturally imagine in our minds. Examining specific films as well as early cave images, the book discusses how certain creatures on rock walls and movie screens express animal-to-human evolution and the structures of our brains. The book presents a new model of the human brain with its theatrical, cinematic, and animal elements. It also develops a theory of "rasa-catharsis" as the clarifying of emotions within and between spectators of the stage or screen, drawing on Eastern and Western aesthetics as well as current neuroscience. It focuses on the "inner movie theater" of memories, dreams, and reality representations, involving developmental stages, as well as the "hall of mirrors," ape-egos, and body-swapping identifications between human beings. Finally, the book shows how ironic twists onscreen—especially of contradictory emotions—might evoke a reappraisal of feelings, helping spectators to be more attentive to their own impulses. Through this interdisciplinary study, scholars, artists, and general readers will find a fresh way to understand the potential for interactive mindfulness and yet cathartic backfire between human brains—in cinema, in theater, and in daily life.

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432

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

1440844364

ISBN 13

9781440844362

Inner Theatres of Good and Evil

The Mind's Staging of Gods, Angels and Devils

By: Mark Pizzato

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Inner Theatres of Good and Evil

The Mind's Staging of Gods, Angels and Devils

By: Mark Pizzato

Among the most intriguing questions of neurology is how conceptions of good and evil arise in the human brain. In a world where we encounter god-like forces in nature, and try to transcend them, the development of a neural network dramatizing good against evil seems inevitable. This critical book explores the cosmic dimensions of the brain's inner theatre as revealed by neurology, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, psychoanalysis, primatology and exemplary Western performances. In theatre, film, and television, supernatural figures express the brain's anatomical features as humans transform their natural environment into cosmic and theological spaces in order to grapple with their vulnerability in the world.

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369

Publisher

McFarland

Published Date

ISBN 10

0786457589

ISBN 13

9780786457588

Death in American Texts and Performances

Corpses, Ghosts, and the Reanimated Dead

By: Mark Pizzato

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Death in American Texts and Performances

Corpses, Ghosts, and the Reanimated Dead

By: Mark Pizzato

How do twentieth and twenty-first century artists bring forth the powerful reality of death when it exists in memory and lived experience as something that happens only to others? Death in American Texts and Performances takes up this question to explore the modern and postmodern aesthetics of death. Working between and across genres, the contributors examine literary texts and performance media, including Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead, Luis Valdez' Dark Root of a Scream, Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing, Toni Morrison's Sula and Song of Solomon, Don DeLillo's White Noise and Falling Man, and HBO's Six Feet Under. As the contributors struggle to convey the artist's crisis of representation, they often locate the dilemma in the gap between artifice and nature, where loss is performed and where re-membering is sometimes literally reenacted through the bodily gesture. While artists confront the impossibility of total recovery or transformation, so must the contributors explore the gulf between real corpses and their literary or performative reconstructions. Ultimately, the volume shows both artist and critic grappling with the dilemma of showing how the aesthetics of death as absence is made meaningful in and by language.

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Page Count

254

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1317154444

ISBN 13

9781317154440

European Churches and Chinese Temples as Neuro-Theatrical Sites

By: Mark Pizzato

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European Churches and Chinese Temples as Neuro-Theatrical Sites

By: Mark Pizzato

Compares monumental designs and performance spaces of Christian, Buddhist, and related sanctuaries, exploring how brain networks, animal-human emotions, and cultural ideals are reflected historically and affected today as "inner theatre" elements. Integrating research across the humanities and sciences, this book explores how traditional designs of outer theatrical spaces left cultural imprints for the inner staging of Self and Other consciousness, which each of us performs daily based on how we think others view us. But believers also perform in a cosmic theatre. Ancestral spirits and gods (or God) watch and interact with them in awe-inspiring spaces, grooming affects toward in-group identification and sacrifice, or out-group rivalry and scapegoating. In a study of over 80 buildings – shown by 40 images in the book, plus thousands of photos and videos online – Pizzato demonstrates how they reflect meta-theatrical projections from prior generations. They also affect the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended (4E) cognition of current visitors, who bring performance frameworks of belief, hope, and doubt to the sacred site. This involves neuro-social, inner/outer theatre networks with patriarchal, maternal, and trickster paradigms. European Churches and Chinese Temples as Neuro-Theatrical Sites investigates performative material cultures, creating dialogs between theatre, philosophy, history, and various (cognitive, affective, social, biological) sciences. It applies them to the architecture of religious buildings: from Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant in Europe, plus key sites in Jerusalem and prior “pagan” temples, to Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and imperial in China. It thus reveals individualist/collectivist, focal/holistic, analytical/dialectical, and melodramatic/tragicomic trajectories, with cathartic poetics for the future.

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Page Count

329

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 13

9798765109137

Theatres of Human Sacrifice

From Ancient Ritual to Screen Violence

By: Mark Pizzato

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Theatres of Human Sacrifice

From Ancient Ritual to Screen Violence

By: Mark Pizzato

Provides insight into the ritual lures and effects of mass media spectatorship, especially regarding the pleasures, risks, and purposes of violent display. Contemporary debates about mass media violence tend to ignore the long history of staged violence in the theatres and rituals of many cultures. In Theatres of Human Sacrifice, Mark Pizzato relates the appeal and possible effects of screen violence todayin sports, movies, and television newsto specific sacrificial rites and performance conventions in ancient Greek, Aztec, and Roman culture. Using the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan, Kristeva, and Zðizûek, as well as the theatrical theories of Artaud and Brecht, the book offers insights into the ritual lures and effects of current mass media spectatorship, especially regarding the pleasures, purposes, and risks of violent display. Updating Aristotle’s notion of catharsis, Pizzato identifies a sacrificial imperative within the human mind, structured by various patriarchal cultures and manifested in distinctive rites and dramas, with both positive and negative potential effects on their audiences. Mark Pizzato is Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the author of Edges of Loss: From Modern Drama to Postmodern Theory.

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Page Count

277

Publisher

State University of New York Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0791484238

ISBN 13

9780791484234

Edges of Loss

From Modern Drama to Postmodern Theory

By: Mark Pizzato

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Edges of Loss

From Modern Drama to Postmodern Theory

By: Mark Pizzato

Investigates the reasons for postmodern theory's fascination with theater

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Page Count

252

Publisher

University of Michigan Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0472109146

ISBN 13

9780472109142

Inner Theatres of Good and Evil

The Mind's Staging of Gods, Angels and Devils

By: Mark Pizzato

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Inner Theatres of Good and Evil

The Mind's Staging of Gods, Angels and Devils

By: Mark Pizzato

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Page Count

369

Publisher

McFarland

Published Date

ISBN 10

0786457589

ISBN 13

9780786457588

A Conspiracy of Genes

By: Mark de Castrique

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A Conspiracy of Genes

By: Mark de Castrique

Gene Adamson thought he knew the answers. He thought he'd cracked the conspiracy wide open. He was so wrong. As a young girl's life hangs in the balance, seventeen-year-old Gene Adamson stumbles into a conspiracy so deadly the very knowledge of its existence marks him for death. . . . . . "The suspense builds to a brilliant conclusion ... This work is storytelling at its best totally drawing you into every event happening ... a great read and I give it a high recommendation." --Shirley Johnson, Senior Reviewer, MidWest Book Review

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